Welcome back to the show! Hacker Valley Studio podcast features Host Ron Eddings, as he explores the world of cybersecurity through the eyes of professionals in the industry. We cover everything from inspirational real-life stories in tech, to highlighting influential cybersecurity companies, and we do so in a fun and enthusiastic way. We’re making cybersecurity accessible, creating a whole new form of entertainment: cybertainment.
Episodes
Monday May 18, 2026
Monday May 18, 2026
Right now, someone in your organization is probably feeding sensitive data into an AI system that nobody approved. So when something goes wrong, who's responsible? And more critically, do you even have a policy in place to answer that question?
Ron Eddings sits down with his Hacker Valley co-founder, Chris Cochran, now serving as SANS Field CISO and VP of AI Security, to talk about his freshly released SANS AI Security Maturity Model, a practical framework built for security leaders who need to stop philosophizing and start making decisions.
They cover the three pillars of AI security maturity: utilizing AI for defense, protecting AI itself, and governing it across the organization. Chris then gets real about where most enterprises actually stand (hint: not as far along as they think). Listen for a conversation that meets you wherever you are: skeptic, early adopter, or somewhere in between.
Impactful Moments
00:00 - Introduction
03:00 - Chris Cochran: from Co-Founder to SANS Field CISO
04:20 - Your board is pushing AI before security is ready
06:00 - Tiers of AI uses: summarization to full automation
07:50 - When AI shouldn't make the final call
10:10 - Bite-sized AI: starting small in the enterprise
11:45 - Introducing the SANS AI Security Maturity Model
13:20 - You can no longer afford to be an AI skeptic
16:30 - Three buckets: utilize, protect, and govern AI
18:50 - Fact or Cap: what level of maturity is your enterprise?
21:00 - Retroactive vendor risk and the AI explosion
23:05 - Agentic Identity: workforce, non-human, and beyond
25:00 - What works in the agentic identity space?
27:05 - Blockchain for agent identity: promising or hype?
29:00 - A Message for the next generation of practitioners
31:30 - Ron's closing take: who owns your AI policy?
Links
Connect with Chris Cochran on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishvm/
Download the SANS AI Security Maturity Model: https://www.sans.org/mlp/2026-ai-security-maturity-model-ebook
Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams
Join our creative mastermind and stand out as a cybersecurity professional: https://www.patreon.com/hackervalleystudio
Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com
Continue the conversation by joining our Discord: https://hackervalley.com/discord
Become a sponsor of the show to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/
Friday May 01, 2026
Friday May 01, 2026
Mythos just found 30,000 new vulnerabilities, and now every security team is asking the same question: what actually matters?
In this episode, Ron Eddings sits down with Dan Pagel, CEO at Brinqa, and Brad Hibbert COO & CSO at Brinqa, to break down the Anthropic Mythos moment that rattled the security industry. From the panic of millions of new findings dropping overnight to the strategy of narrowing them down to the 50 that actually matter in YOUR environment, this episode is a masterclass in exposure management at machine speed.
Dan and Brad share how Brinqa helps organizations make sense of massive volumes of findings, correlating data across 260+ connectors, enriching vulnerability context, and delivering clear, explainable actions to IT operations teams.
They also tackle the bigger question: how do you build enough trust in AI to let it take autonomous action on your behalf? The answer starts with better data, better explainability, and knowing when to keep humans in (or on) the loop.
Impactful Moments
00:00 - Introduction
02:00 - What just happened? Breaking down the Anthropic Mythos moment
04:10 - Why most new findings don’t apply to your environment
07:12 - What Mythos means to the broader market
09:09 - Why AI-driven discovery isn’t slowing down
11:00 - The gap between security and IT ops: how explainability closes it
13:38 - How fast you should go through findings
15:53 - Why MTTR is the wrong metric and what businesses actually care about
18:03 - Why real-time visibility is replacing scheduled scanning
19:50 - Human IN the loop vs. human ON the loop
22:14 - What happens when AI hallucinates?
27:20 - Why we’re over and under-estimating the impact of AI
29:54 - The immediate win Brinqa achieves for its customers
31:50 - What CISOs are really asking now: "What does good look like?"
Links
Connect with our guest, Dan Pagel, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpagel/
Connect with our guest, Brad Hibbert, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradhibbert/
Learn more about Brinqa: https://www.brinqa.com/
Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams
Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com
Become a sponsor of the show to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/
Friday Apr 24, 2026
Friday Apr 24, 2026
SOAR promised to close the loop in the SOC and fell flat. Agentic AI is finally delivering what a decade of playbooks couldn’t.
In this episode, Ron sits down with Allan Alford, SVP at NTT Global Data Centers, and Tom Findling, co-founder and CEO of Conifers.ai. They cover why static playbooks broke under real-world conditions and how agentic systems are flipping the SOC operating model. They get into hallucination guardrails, human-on-the-loop versus human-in-the-loop, and the QR-code phishing investigation an agent solved on its own without being told how. The conversation closes on trust thresholds, the speed of enterprise adoption, and Allan's blunt warning to any CISO trying to slow this train down… you're already on the tracks.
Impactful Moments
00:00 - Intro
02:30 - Why the lazy sysadmin always wins
05:15 - Why SOAR fell flat
08:00 - Guardrails, hallucinations, and showing the work
13:00 - The SOC AI holy grail
15:30 - The moment you start saying we
17:30 - QR-code phishing the agent solved alone
19:00 - Why playbooks were never going to scale
28:00 - Earning trust at enterprise scale
33:30 - Stand in front of this revolution and lose
35:40 - Risk quantification on business steroids
Links
Connect with our guest, Tom Findling, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomfindling/
Learn more about Conifers.ai at https://www.conifers.ai
Connect with our guest, Allan Alford, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allanalford/
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Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams
Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com
Become a sponsor of the show to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/
Friday Apr 17, 2026
Friday Apr 17, 2026
In 2025, Torq brought a monster truck to RSAC. And Don Jeter, Torq's CMO, will be the first to tell you: nobody's buying an AI SOC platform because of a grave digger in the booth.
In this episode, Ron sits down with Don to discuss what Torq is actually doing in a category packed with 60 near-identical vendors, and why "the epidemic of sameness" is the real threat to every cybersecurity brand right now. Don explains why Torq builds everything in-house, why he starts every strategy by listening instead of pitching the product, and why the only differentiator left in cyber marketing is how much you genuinely care. It's a conversation about brand, but it's really a conversation about trust, community, and what it takes to make a CISO text you back.
Impactful Moments
00:00 - Introduction
03:50 - How Don landed at Torq
06:09 - What the Torq brand stands for
07:41 - Giving cybersecurity pros their flowers
09:09 - Cookie-cutter booths, cookie-cutter brands
12:00 - Why Torq built everything in-house
15:34 - Start with listening, not the product
18:13 - "We have to out-care the other teams"
21:45 - Nobody buys because of a monster truck
24:06 - Welcome to the experience age
28:30 - Entertain them or lose them
Links
Connect with our guest, Don Jeter, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donjeter/
Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams
Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com
Become a sponsor of the show to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/
Tuesday Apr 07, 2026
Tuesday Apr 07, 2026
Most organizations are prepping for disaster recovery when they should be building for cyber recovery, and those are not the same thing.
Recorded live at RSAC Conference 2026, Ron sat down with Chris Bevil, Principal Security AI Strategist at Commvault, to break down what actually happens after a breach hits and why most teams are caught flat-footed.
Chris walks us through Commvault's Minutes to Meltdown tabletop exercise, why isolated recovery environments matter, and how clean data determines whether you get your company back in hours or in 200+ days.
This episode will tell you what separates a team that recovers from a team that unravels.
Impactful Moments
01:16 - Live at RSAC 2026 with Chris Bevil, Principal, Security AI Strategist at Commvault
01:40 - Minutes to Meltdown origin story
03:00 - What goes into a Meltdown?
04:48 - What happens in the first 30 minutes of chaos
07:00 - What Commvault actually does
08:21 - What is IRE? Isolated recovery environment breakdown
10:40 - What is Disaster Recovery in 2026?
13:00 - How cyber recovery differs from disaster recovery
14:20 - Where attackers go in the first 30 minutes
15:40 - The 3-2-1 rule and where teams fail
21:45 - What successful recovery looks like
25:14 - AI strategy at Commvault
Links
Connect with our guest, Chris Bevil, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-b-211998a/
Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com
Become a sponsor of the show to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/